Access to the past would open all sorts of new possibilities of more than travel.

(ISNS) — Time travel is often a way to change history in science fiction such as “Back to the Future” and “Looper.” Now researchers suggest a certain kind of time machine could also possess another powerful capability — cloning perfect copies of anything.

However, scientists noted the way these findings violate what is currently known about quantum physics might instead mean such time machines are not possible.

We are all time travelers in that we all move forward in time. However, scientists have suggested it might be possible to move back in time by manipulating the fabric of space and time in our cosmos. All mass distorts space-time, causing the experience of gravity, a bit like how a ball sitting on a rubber sheet would make nearby balls on the sheet roll toward it. Physicists have proposed time machines that could bend the fabric of space and time so much that timelines actually turn back on themselves, forming loops technically known as “closed timelike curves.”

These space-time warps can develop because of wormholes — tunnels that can in theory allow travel anywhere in space and time, or even into another universe. Wormholes are allowed by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, although whether they are practically possible is another matter.

A key limitation of this kind of time machine would be that any traveler using it cannot go back to a time before the device was built. It only permits travel from the future back to any point in time after the machine was constructed.

Scientists have for decades explored what closed timelike curves are capable of if they are possible.

One complication they would encounter is the no-cloning theorem in quantum physics, which basically forbids the creation of identical copies of any particle one does not know everything about to begin with.

In classical physics, one can generate a perfect copy of anything by finding out every detail about it and arranging the same components in the same order. However, in the bizarre world of quantum physics — the best description so far of how reality behaves on its most fundamental levels — one cannot perfectly measure every detail of an object at once. This is related to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which notes that one can perfectly measure either the position or the momentum of a particle, but not both with unlimited accuracy.

Nearly 25 years ago, theoretical physicist David Deutsch at the University of Oxford in England suggested closed timelike curves might actually violate the no-cloning theorem, allowing perfect copies to be constructed of anything. Now scientists reveal this might be true in findings detailed in the Nov. 8 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

To understand this research, imagine one builds a time machine in the year 2000. One could place a letter into the device in the year 3000 and pick it up within this box in 2000 or any year between then and 3000. From the perspective of the letter, it goes inside this time machine into one mouth of a wormhole in the future and comes out the other mouth of the wormhole in the past.

However, theoretical physicist Mark Wilde at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, and his colleagues found this scenario may be more complex than previously thought. Instead of the time machine containing just one wormhole, it could possess many wormholes, each at some point in time between the future and the moment of its creation. A letter entering the box in 3000 might exit from a wormhole in 2999, instantaneously go back into that wormhole and emerge in 2998, and so on.

“It’s like there are 1,000 different particles emerging from all the wormholes, but in fact they’re all the same particle you sent in the beginning,” Wilde said. “You just have all these temporary copies emerging from and going back into these wormholes.”

The Secret teaches that victims are always to blame, and that anyone can have anything simply by wishing.

Prepare to have everything you’ve ever wanted, simply by thinking happy thoughts about it; and be careful of negative scary thoughts which might cause those things to happen to you to too. Little did you know that, just like in the original Star Trek episode Shore Leave, whatever you think of — either good or bad — will actually happen! This is the premise of Rhonda Byrne‘s 2006 book and movie, both titled The Secret.

Rhonda Byrne is an Australian television producer and author. Her book and movie propose that many of the most successful people throughout history have known a “secret” — a secret closely guarded in the marketing materials for the book and movie. The “secret” turns out to be nothing more than the old motivational speaker’s standby, that positive thinking leads to positive results. But she took the idea a step further. The Secret claims that you can actually cause events to happen by wishing for them hard enough, literally like winning the lottery or recovering from terminal illness. Similarly, a focus on fears or negative ideas will cause those things to appear or happen as well. The Secret calls this the “Law of Attraction”. The Secret further makes the completely unfounded claim that many great people knew and relied upon this wisdom, and taught it to others as “secret teachers”. “Secret teachers” included Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Sir Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Carl Jung, Henry Ford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Campbell, Alexander Graham Bell, and even Beethoven. This claim is just a made-up lie: Most of these people lived before the “Law of Attraction” was invented, and there’s no evidence that any of them ever heard of it.

As of today (2008), a year and a half after its release, The Secret remains #26 of Amazon’s list of best selling books, better than any Harry Potter book. It has over 2,000 customer reviews. Half of them are 5 star, and a quarter of them are 1 star. This is the sign of a polarizing book. Most people either love it or find it to be utter nonsense. In the case of The Secret, most people love it. Thanks in large part to promotion by Oprah Winfrey, The Secret sold 2 million DVD’s in its first year and 4 million books in its first six months.

“Wealth is a mindset. Money is literally attracted to you or repelled from you. It’s all about how you think.” – The Secret

Many of the people appearing in the movie version of The Secret are motivational speakers who spout the same old “If you can dream it, you can do it” nonsense that Amway salesmen have been chanting for decades. In essence, part of what Rhonda Byrne has done has been to simply repackage Motivational Speaking 101 inside the wrapper of a century-old philosophical construct, which we’ll look at in closer detail in a moment.

As you’ve probably heard, The Secret has been roundly criticized from all quarters. The most common criticism is of The Secret’s assertion that victims are always to blame for whatever happens to them. Whether it’s a rape victim, a tsunami victim, or a heart attack victim, The Secret teaches that they brought it upon themselves with their own negative thoughts. This idea is, of course, profoundly offensive in many ways. Doctors attack The Secret for teaching that positive thinking is an adequate substitute for medical care in cases of serious illness: Wish for it hard enough, and your cancer tumors will melt away. Religious leaders criticize The Secret for its ethical claims that victims are always to blame, and for promoting the attitude that anyone can be just like a god by wishing hard enough. Many financial critics and advisors have pointed out the dangers of yet another baseless get-rich-quick scheme. The list of critics of The Secret goes on and on, as tends to happen to any mega-successful franchise.

Iran’s technological prowess has reached an all-time high. It claims to have solved the metaphysical conundrums associated with time travel.

Ali Razeghi has not created a flux capacitor, and probably doesn’t own a DeLorean. But the managing director at the delightfully-named Centre for Strategic Inventions claims to have put together a device that fits into a “personal computer case” whose algorithms can discern key details about the next five to eight years of a user’s life based merely on a fingertip impression.

Iran’s woes at constructing an intercontinental ballistic missile now appear trivial. Nothing matters more than accurate, predictive intelligence for discerning an adversary’s move before he makes it. An Iranian chrononautical effort gives the Islamic Republic a near omniscience: the ability to access, process and utilize data before it even enters existence. It is entirely possible that the implications of Iranian trans-chronal access are already rippling backward in time across the multiverse, transforming reality in ways that are difficult to comprehend.

There are limited countermeasures Iranian adversaries can design or field. One option would be to design son-of-Stuxnet malware to attack the device itself. But there is great likelihood Razeghi’s machine will have already warned the Iranian security apparatus of a forthcoming cyberattack. A more fruitful option might be to out-invent Iran, and create a better forecasting device than the Iranians possess. Such a move carries heavy implications for the fabric of reality, but Razeghi has already crossed a Rubicon, and U.S. policymakers must now ask themselves how long they are prepared to tolerate an Iranian monopoly on time travel.

The question has been asked for decades: why haven’t psychic powers been proven yet? Psychics have been studied for decades, both in and out of the laboratory, yet the scientific community (and the public at large) remains unconvinced.

In a recent book, “Science & Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics,” author Chris Carter insists that the reason that psychic powers have not been proven is because scientists are unaware of the research or refuse to take it seriously because “Clearly many scientists find the claims of parapsychology disturbing.”

Curiosity Spots Mystery Mars ‘Flower’(Click image for analysis)

This is a common charge leveled against skeptics and scientists: that they refuse to acknowledge the existence of paranormal phenomenon (psychic abilities, ghosts, etc.) because it would somehow challenge or “disturb” their worldview.

Skeptics and scientists, they say, are deeply personally and professional invested in defending the scientific status quo and cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that they could be wrong. This results in a closed-minded refusal to accept, or even seriously examine, the evidence.

But is this really true? Do scientists ignore and dismiss claims and evidence that challenge dominant scientific ideas? Let’s examine some recent examples.

Psychic Powers

A study published in 2011 in a scientific journal claimed to have found strong evidence for the existence of psychic powers such as ESP. The paper, written by Cornell professor Daryl J. Bem, was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and quickly made headlines around the world for its implication: that psychic powers had been scientifically proven.

Bem’s claim of evidence for ESP wasn’t ridiculed or ignored; instead it was taken seriously and tested by scientific researchers.

Replication is of course the hallmark of valid scientific research — if the findings are true and accurate, they should be able to be replicated by others. Otherwise the results may simply be due to normal and expected statistical variations and errors. If other experimenters cannot get the same result using the same techniques, it’s usually a sign that the original study was flawed in one or more ways.

A team of researchers collaborated to accurately replicate Bem’s final experiment, and found no evidence for any psychic powers. Their results were published in the journal PLoS ONE. Bem — explicitly contradicting Carter’s suggestion that skeptics set out to discredit his work or refused to look at it — acknowledged that the findings did not support his claims and wrote that the researchers had “made a competent, good-faith effort to replicate the results of one of my experiments on precognition.”

In September 2011, news shot around the world that Italian physicists had measured particles traveling faster than light. The neutrino in the experiment only exceeded the speed of light by a little tiny bit — 60 nanoseconds — but if validated would violate the fundamental laws of physics.

Questions swirled: Would the findings hold up under repeated experiments? Could this team have proven Einstein wrong about the speed of light?

What was the reaction from the scientific community to the news of this fundamentals-of-physics-challenging finding? They didn’t ignore the results, hoping the inconvenient truth would go away; they didn’t brand the scientists liars or hoaxers; they didn’t shout, “Burn the witch, this is heresy and cannot be true!”

Instead, they did what all scientists do when confronted with such anomalous evidence: they took a closer look at the experiment to make sure the results were valid, and tried to replicate the research. It later turned out that the anomaly was caused by at least two measurement errors, possibly including a loose cable: the experiment was flawed.

The scientists were not skeptical because accepting that Einstein was wrong about something would lead to a nervous breakdown, or that their whole worldview would crumble beneath them, or that they would have to accept that science doesn’t know everything.

The reason scientists were skeptical is because the new study contradicted all previous experiments. That’s what good science does: When you do a study or experiment — especially one whose results conflict with earlier conclusions, you study it closely and question it before accepting the results.

In science, those who disprove dominant theories are rewarded, not punished. Disproving one of Einstein’s best-known predictions (or proving the existence of psychic powers) would earn the dissenting scientists a place in the history books, if not a Nobel Prize.

The same pattern exists in other areas of the unexplained. For example . . . (READ MORE) . . .

A white Ford pickup pulled up to cattle pasture near Ponca City, Oklahoma, in early Fall 1971, and stopped at a gate. Karl, Mark, and Gordon worked for cattle feed distributor and were sent to this remote area to pick up a feeder. What they found there has kept them silent for 41 years.

“We opened the gate, which was barbed wire with no lock, and entered,” Karl said. “We went on the property, which was covered with grass up to and over the hood of the truck.”

They drove through the tall grass to the tank that sat close to a red barn and got out of the truck.

“We realized the tank was almost half full and too heavy to load,” Karl said. “We decided to leave and drove around the red barn and we saw a large, two story white house, with no lights in front of us.”

The trio drove back to the cattle feed company and the boss said he’d drain the tank and they could pick it up tomorrow.

“We went to the location to retrieve the tank the next night,” Karl said. “This time we decided to go through the old white big house on the hill and brought our shotguns.”

They drove onto the property over the path they’d made through the grass the day before and loaded the tank. Then they pulled around the barn toward the house. What they saw burned into their memories.

“It was no longer there,” Karl said. “We walked up the hill where it stood and there were no signs of demolition, no foundation, nothing at all. What we all seemed to witness the night before was no longer there. We have talked to each other over the years but none of us can begin to explain this vision.”

Did these men witness a slip in time?

Time slips have been reported throughout history. English women vacationing in France in 1901 claimed they stepped into the French Revolution, and two English couples traveling in Spain in the 1970s stayed at an oddly archaic hotel that was simply gone on their return journey.

Physicists like Albert Einstein, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking have all said time travel is theoretically possible; our science just can’t achieve it. But what if nature can?

Back in 1955, the late Morris K. Jessup’s book, The Case for the UFO, was published. It was a book that delved deeply into two key issues: (a) the theoretical power-source of UFOs, and (b) the utilization of the universal gravitational field as a form of energy. Not long after the publication of the book, Jessup became the recipient of a series of extremely strange missives from a certain Carlos Miquel Allende, of Pennsylvania. In his correspondence, Allende commented on Jessup’s theories, and gave details of an alleged secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Navy in the Philadelphia Naval Yard in October 1943. Thus was born the highly controversial saga of what has become known as the Philadelphia Experiment.

According to Allende’s incredible tale, during the experiment a warship was rendered optically invisible and teleported to – and then back from – Norfolk, Virginia in a few minutes, the incredible feat supposedly having supposedly been accomplished by applying Albert Einstein’s never-completed Unified Field theory. Allende elaborated that the ship used in the experiment was the DE 173 USS Eldridge; and, moreover, that he, Allende, had actually witnessed one of the attempts to render both the ship and its crew invisible from his position out at sea on-board a steamer called the SS Andrew Furuseth.

If Allende was telling the truth, then the Navy had not only begun to grasp the nature of invisibility, but it had also stumbled upon the secret of teleportation of the type demonstrated – decades later, in fictional, on-screen format – in Star Trek and The Fly. On these very matters, Allende made the disturbing claim that not only did the experiment render many of the crew-members as mad as hatters, but some, he said, even vanished – literally – from the ship while the test was at its height, never to be seen again. Others reportedly suffered horrific and agonizing deaths.

Of course, as students of this very weird affair will know, the tale of Allende and the vanishing ship (or non-vanishing ship, depending on your perspective!) has been denounced as much as it has been championed. But, few are aware of the U.S. Navy’s official stance on the matter. Many assume – quite incorrectly – that the Navy’s position is that nothing whatsoever occurred at all. But their assumptions are wrong.

Contrary to what you might think, the Navy does believe the story has a basis in fact – albeit of a far more down to earth nature.